Achieving Collective Welfare in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Suggestion Sharing

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jin, Yue, Wei, Shuangqing, Montana, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913894677610496
author Jin, Yue
Wei, Shuangqing
Montana, Giovanni
author_facet Jin, Yue
Wei, Shuangqing
Montana, Giovanni
contents In human society, the conflict between self-interest and collective well-being often obstructs efforts to achieve shared welfare. Related concepts like the Tragedy of the Commons and Social Dilemmas frequently manifest in our daily lives. As artificial agents increasingly serve as autonomous proxies for humans, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) method to address this issue - learning policies to maximise collective returns even when individual agents' interests conflict with the collective one. Unlike traditional cooperative MARL solutions that involve sharing rewards, values, and policies or designing intrinsic rewards to encourage agents to learn collectively optimal policies, we propose a novel MARL approach where agents exchange action suggestions. Our method reveals less private information compared to sharing rewards, values, or policies, while enabling effective cooperation without the need to design intrinsic rewards. Our algorithm is supported by our theoretical analysis that establishes a bound on the discrepancy between collective and individual objectives, demonstrating how sharing suggestions can align agents' behaviours with the collective objective. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm performs competitively with baselines that rely on value or policy sharing or intrinsic rewards.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12326
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Achieving Collective Welfare in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Suggestion Sharing
Jin, Yue
Wei, Shuangqing
Montana, Giovanni
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
In human society, the conflict between self-interest and collective well-being often obstructs efforts to achieve shared welfare. Related concepts like the Tragedy of the Commons and Social Dilemmas frequently manifest in our daily lives. As artificial agents increasingly serve as autonomous proxies for humans, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) method to address this issue - learning policies to maximise collective returns even when individual agents' interests conflict with the collective one. Unlike traditional cooperative MARL solutions that involve sharing rewards, values, and policies or designing intrinsic rewards to encourage agents to learn collectively optimal policies, we propose a novel MARL approach where agents exchange action suggestions. Our method reveals less private information compared to sharing rewards, values, or policies, while enabling effective cooperation without the need to design intrinsic rewards. Our algorithm is supported by our theoretical analysis that establishes a bound on the discrepancy between collective and individual objectives, demonstrating how sharing suggestions can align agents' behaviours with the collective objective. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm performs competitively with baselines that rely on value or policy sharing or intrinsic rewards.
title Achieving Collective Welfare in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Suggestion Sharing
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12326